By mid-morning on Day 150, the escape column had dropped into the lower foothills. There, the subalpine firs gave way to broad-leafed alder and open pasture slopes. The heat had risen under the bright morning sun, softening the night’s frost and releasing the rich, stone scent of damp clay and thawing moss.
Then, as the lead echelon rounded a sharp limestone spur two miles beyond the northern boundary of the exchanged Empty Choir parcel, the column ground to a sudden, jarring halt.
Across the narrow road bench. There, the cart track skirted the base of an overhanging shale bluff, lay a fresh rockslide.
It wasn’t a magical collapse, and it wasn’t a military barrier. It was forty tons of fractured grey shale, wet gravel, and two five-foot pale limestone boulders that had broken loose from the upper bluff during the night’s freeze-thaw cycle. The debris filled the roadbed ten paces wide and four feet deep, spilling down into the roadside ditch and fully blocking the passage of the four-wheeled medical litters and the heavy baggage wagons.
A young orchard grower named Joram Pike. He walked near the front of the third echelon, dropped his cart shafts in the gravel and stared at the rubble with sudden panic in his eyes. He turned and came running back along the line of carts. His face was pale, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
